This invention relates to a method and system which facilitate the processing of financial documents in banking systems.
In recent years there has been an increased effort towards automating the processing of financial documents in banking systems. Three prior art systems which show various approaches toward automating the processing,of financial documents are shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,949,363, 4,205,780, and 4,264,804, for example.
In the processing of financial documents such as checks and deposit slips in a banking system, for example, a point is reached in the processing at which the courtesy or monetary amount on a document is read so as to be inputted into the system.
The present invention relates specifically to a method and system for finding image data associated with the monetary amount on financial documents so as to facilitate the application of machine, character-recognition techniques to the just-found, image data associated with the monetary amount.
The system according to this invention relates to a system for locating intelligence data in the form of characters associated with a document in which the intelligence data is associated with a clue character on the document and in which the intelligence data and clue character are presented to the system in the form of a matrix of binary data corresponding to image data associated with at least a portion of said document on which said intelligence data and clue character are located, comprising: means for receiving and also storing said matrix of binary data; means for withdrawing from said receiving and storing means a portion of said binary data of said matrix corresponding to a character which may be a clue character or a character of said intelligence data, said portion of said binary data being hereinafter referred to as character data; said character data having machine-readable topographical features which are indicative of the character associated therewith; and means for evaluating said topographical features of said character data to determine whether or not said character data is indicative of a clue character.
The method according to this invention relates to a method of locating intelligence data in the form of characters associated with a document in which the intelligence data is associated with a clue character on the document and in which the intelligence data and clue character are presented in the form of a matrix of binary data corresponding to image data associated with at least a portion of said document on which said intelligence data and clue character are located, comprising the steps: (a) receiving and storing said matrix of binary data in a storage; (b) withdrawing from said storage a portion of said binary data of said matrix corresponding to a character which may be a clue character or a character of said intelligence data, said portion of said binary data being hereinafter referred to as character data; said character data having machine-readable topographical features which are indicative of the character associated therewith; and (c) evaluating said topographical features of said character data to determine whether or not said character data is indicative of a clue character.
In a preferred embodiment of this invention, the clue character referred to can be either a dollar sign ($) or an asterisk (*) because the courtesy or monetary amount on financial documents generally follows such a clue character. Suspected clue characters are evaluated with regard to their machine-readable topographical features instead of using "masks".
The present invention is relatively simple to implement and it can identify the several different kinds of asterisks and dollar signs currently in use.
These advantages and others will be more readily understood in connection with the following description, claims and drawing.